


Grief, and the Smile Junkie II

by toushindai (WallofIllusion)



Series: Grief, and the Smile Junkie [2]
Category: Baccano!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-06
Updated: 2017-02-06
Packaged: 2018-09-22 08:39:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,058
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9596969
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WallofIllusion/pseuds/toushindai
Summary: Exhausted by grief, Huey sleeps. Elmer watches over him.





	

**Author's Note:**

> part two of [this one.](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5012395)

It rained through the night. The steady sound of the rain slipping into the ocean provided a meaningless background noise, sometimes swelling, sometimes receding, never quite unnoticeable enough to fade out of Elmer’s consciousness. But few things ever did. 

He sat in motionless, unsmiling silence. His classmates hardly would have recognized him. This was something he did for Huey; something he had been doing for Huey for months now, whenever his fear and pain were too much for him to control. But he’d never done it for hours and hours like this before. It was easier than he would have expected. When he felt himself beginning to drift, he played fact-recall games with himself or he thought of some of his favorite smiles. But Huey’s kept coming up, and that made him feel weird. He went back to the mental games. And for the most part, his mind was fine with the silence. 

At one point, early in the night, Huey’s voice drifted across the room, hesitant and afraid and aching.  

“Elmer?”

He didn’t turn over in the bed to look at Elmer. 

“I’m here, Huey,” Elmer reassured him. “What is it?”

But no answer came to that. The warehouse fell into silence once more, cocooned by the rain outside. 

Just once, Elmer faded into to sleep. He heard and felt someone cross the bedroom floor: Monica. Without being able to see her face in the darkness, he felt her standing over Huey, at first smiling down at him wistfully, then solemn. The floor creaked as she turned towards Elmer. 

“Elmer,” he heard her say, quiet desperation in her voice, “please.”

“I’ll do whatever I can, Moni-Moni,” he promised her, and for some reason the nickname felt all wrong. But she smiled at it, wistful again, and turned back towards Huey. By the time Elmer exhaled, she was gone. He shifted and opened his eyes. A gray light was beginning to trickle in from outside, and the rain was quieter for now. 

When Huey woke, it was with a drowning man’s gasp. Silence for a few moments, and then, raggedly: “Elmer?”

“I’m here,” he said again. 

“It was a dream,” Huey pleaded, not quite a question so much as a statement longing to be affirmed. Elmer thought of the enormous relief Huey would feel if Elmer just lied to him, thought of a smile too exhausted to be anything but genuine. In Elmer’s mind, it looked so similar to the smile he’d been imagining and awaiting and working towards for half a year. But such a smile wouldn’t last, and Huey had always regarded hope as a poison. He couldn’t take that kind of betrayal, not now. Elmer was all he had, and Elmer had promised not to leave him all alone. 

“It happened,” he told Huey, voice quiet and even. 

Silence, again. Huey was still turned away from Elmer on the bed, still clutching his arms tightly to himself. 

“Are you awake for good? D’you want me to light a lamp?”

Huey shifted his head slightly at that, but not to look at Elmer and not as an answer. Maybe just to see the light creeping across the ceiling. He asked, “Is it morning?”

“Yep. Sun’s coming up.” 

Huey exhaled shakily and then said nothing, his gaze firmly directed towards the wall again. Elmer could guess what he was thinking: that for the first time in twenty years, the sun had risen on a world without Monica in it, leaving her irrevocably in the past. The irreverent part of Elmer’s mind bantered back, _well, it’s so cloudy, does it count if we can’t see the sun?_ Under normal circumstances, Huey’s answer would have been wry and acidic. These weren’t normal circumstances. Elmer knew that. He changed the subject instead. 

“You should eat something. You barely touched your breakfast yesterday.” And after that, there hadn’t been a chance. 

“’m not hungry.”

 _It’ll cheer you up_ , Elmer bit back. _It’ll make you feel better._ It probably wouldn’t do either, for one, and he had the sense that Huey didn’t want to feel better right now. 

Still, he repeated, “You should eat.”

“No.” His voice was flat and final. “You eat, if you’re hungry.”

“I’m fine.” He could make it a few days without food. It wouldn’t be the first time. “Should I light a lamp?”

“No.” The same flat voice. “It’ll be light in here soon enough.”

Come to think of it, the windows of this room faced east. The room probably got very good light on a sunny day. The clouds were probably better-suited to how Huey felt right now, though.

Again silence fell over the room and time slipped forward. Elmer wondered what his friend was thinking. He wondered what it would take to help Huey smile again. He opened his mouth.

“Huey—”

“She smiled,” Huey interrupted him.

Elmer let the words he’d been planning to say die in his throat. ”Yeah, she did,” he answered instead, and allowed himself a wistful smile of his own. “It was beautiful, wasn’t it?”

“She smiled, and she said—”

Huey began to shake, his breath growing erratic with the threat of tears again. Elmer waited. It was really all he knew how to do in this situation.

When Huey had control of himself again, he finally rolled over in bed to face Elmer. His eyes were red and haunted. 

“She said ‘let’s meet again.’” And then the little composure he had wavered, and more quietly, he added, “Didn’t she?”

Elmer thought back to Monica’s final moments, the movement of her lips.

“Yeah, she did,” he confirmed. When Huey searched his face, he added, “I’m not lying. I promise, I won’t lie to you right now, Huey.”

A shudder of what might have been relief. Huey screwed his eyes shut, biting his lower lip hard. Again, Elmer waited.

“I want to,” Huey said in a whisper. “I want to see her again, Elmer, I—I— _why_ —”

And then he turned away again, curling into a tight ball. He was broken. He was  _shattered_ , and there was nothing Elmer would be able to do to hasten his recovery. All he could do was wait. And so he turned his gaze away, willing his memory not to record his friend’s sobs.

Time slipped forward again in what he would later remember as silence.

 


End file.
